Reduced Parasite Burden in Children with Falciparum Malaria and Bacteremia Coinfections: Role of Mediators of Inflammation

Figure 5

Multiple mediation model. Inflammatory mediators were correlated with the independent variable (infection status, values to left of mediators) and parasitemia ( values to the right of mediators) individually, and those with significant correlations with the dependent variable (parasitemia) were used to populate the multiple mediation model. All nonparametric variables were log transformed. “infection status” was dummy coded as follows: Pf[+] monoinfected = 0; bacteremia coinfected = 1. The multiple mediation model was populated with ten inflammatory mediators that showed significant correlation with parasitemia, with age used as a covariate, and processed using 10,000 bootstrap samples. Post hoc pair-wise contrasts for the four significant mediators (black type; IL-4, IL-10, IL-12, and IFN-γ) were evaluated by examining the bootstrapped confidence intervals, with those intervals not including zero being significant.